The Metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Re-examined
Leonard Goddard and Brenda Judge’s ‘The Metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’ appeared as a Supplement to Volume 60 of the AJP in 1982. At 72 pages it was an awkward piece: too long for a journal article, too short for a book. But it was clearly worth publishing and found a home in the AJP whose Editor at that time was responsible to no external publisher and thus had the discretion to produce this ‘Monograph No. 1’ in a projected series of which this seems to be the sole number. But the AJP was, for the authors, perhaps an unfortunate choice of journal: unlike, say, Philosophical Review which, probably influenced by Norman Malcolm, had a long record of publishing papers on Wittgenstein, the AJP had a short one, with very little on the Tractatus itself, and was thus for later authors not a natural place to look for useful discussion of that difficult work. Consequently, the history of the monograph is largely one of undeserved neglect: reviews are few; discussions fewer. (A rare exception is Bradley [1987], included in this collection.) Accordingly, it comes as a particular pleasure to mark the centenary of the appearance of the Tractatus (1921 in German; 1922 in English) by drawing attention to this insightful and still-provocative discussion of it, and especially so by re-publishing it together with a fresh treatment of the issues canvassed therein by the distinguished scholar José L. Zalabardo. Both Bradley and Zalabardo focus on the monograph’s first chapter. This addresses serious difficulties in making sense of the ontology proposed in the early sections of the Tractatus, which, astonishingly (given Wittgenstein’s obsessive attention to detail), look, not just obscure, but incoherent. Nevertheless it should also be noticed that the monograph’s later chapters present applications of that ontology to geometry, and to physics. These on their own justify both renewed attention to Goddard and Judge’s work and Bradley’s assessment of it as ‘strikingly original’.